PlayStation5, PlayStation4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC
Call of Duty is having trouble. Years have passed since then. The core development responsibilities of the once-venerable military shooter series are now divided among four studios: Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, and Raven Software. However, the intense pressure to meet an annual release schedule has clearly worn down the series’ once-pleasant elements to almost nothing.
Sledgehammer takes over this year, attempting to complete a story that never needed to be retold after Infinity Ward’s 2022 Modern Warfare II reboot. If Modern Warfare III’s solo mode could last eight hours, it would be an insult to all undercooked croissants in the world. To label the campaign half-baked would be a disservice.
Continuing from the previous year’s game, the game begins with a somewhat intriguing extraction mission centered around a solitary gulag that offers a minor narrative turn. But soon, the feeling of sprinting around and shooting nameless enemy forces becomes all too familiar, with the protagonists changing nearly every chapter as the narrative attempts to build to a significant conclusion. (Hint: it falls short.)
“An open-map shooter shouldn’t feel boring or predictable, but it does.”
To Sledgehammer’s credit, the company obviously intends to take this project farther. The campaign’s primary addition is the addition of open combat missions, which aim to steer clear of the series’ penchant for glorified corridor runs and instead feature large maps with various objectives that can be completed in any order to meet the overall goals. Though chore-like goals (GPS tag some crates, destroy X number of things) and a lack of genuine stakes disappointed me down from its potential. Although it appears as though you can experiment with numerous strategies to reach your objectives, the game is really just a boring shootout. For example, trying to sneak behind every target would not be fruitful if enemy groups are positioned all around it. It shouldn’t seem monotonous or predictable to play an open-map shooter, yet it does.
Even CoD’s main attraction, multiplayer options for Modern Warfare III, seem cheesy since they mostly reuse modes and maps from the first game. While most of the other modes are the pinnacle of “been there, done that,” Cutthroat, a “new” nine-player game consisting of three teams of three players, tries to inject some squad-based tactics and ultimately feels like an upgrade of Gunfight. While this is going on, zombies continues to be a slightly insane joy, forgoing the polite seriousness of the story and competitive multiplayer in favor of a PvE conflict with legions of undead. However, a switch to bigger areas and extraction goals here results in an experience that is more akin to DMZ crossed with Warzone. It simply lacks the same charm as it once did, and matches that are far too long—45 minutes—eat up what little fun is there.
You may enjoy all of that mediocrity for the low, low price of… practically all of your device storage, as an extra bonus. The download size of Modern Warfare III is more than 200GB, however that only accounts for the size of the game; additional space is needed for files to install on before some is removed after completion. To install everything on the PS5 (tested version), you’ll need to thoroughly wipe up the default SSD if you haven’t increased the internal storage. The game feels overly bloated, even if you don’t have to install everything if you only want the campaign. For example, you can skip the multiplayer parts.
However, does any of that really matter? People will continue to purchase Call of Duty year after year, almost instinctively at this point, providing them with no reason to go in a different direction. Even though the money train is drastically deviating from its intended path, it still carries a lot of money. The fact that this is Annual Franchise Entry #20 crushes any innovation seeds that may exist, giving Sledgehammer very little, if any, room to try and improve the experience. This may be the best we can hope for from the series: a constant repetition of its past glory with very little new to say or do. Unless, that is, CoD takes a few years off to catch its breath and rediscover what made players fall in love with the series all those years ago. Which, let’s face it, is not going to happen at this point, especially not after Microsoft splashed out $68.7 billion to gobble up parent company Activision.